The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) – Obamacare - signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010, is minimal health care reform in the interests of HMO privatization, the pharmaceutical oligopoly and the bourgeois medical professions. And, therefore, absolutely in dialectical opposition to the interests of the working and lower middle classes of America.

PPACA requires most adults not covered by an employer or public insurance plan to maintain health insurance coverage or pay a tax penalty enforceable by the IRS, a provision known as the individual mandate. People earning less than four times the poverty line will receive tax credits to subsidize their purchase of insurance.

Medicaid eligibility is expanded to include those earning up to 133 percent of the poverty line. However, individual states may opt out of the Medicaid expansion, a concession to States' rights interpretations of the United States Constitution). As many states have eligibility thresholds significantly below 133% of the poverty line, and many do not provide any coverage for childless adults, this will create a coverage gap in those states.

This is not a federal or nationalized (or socialized) medicine program for the United States, but a mere bourgeois attempt at neutralization of proletarian socialist measures clamoring for an equitable centralized management of health care.

I call for the legal formation of a Social Democratic political party which could work for Congressional amendments to the United States Constitution amenable to socialist measures of true democratic reform in America.